May 15, 2017

MOUNTAIN VIEW - Mozilla put out a press release early Monday morning detailing their upcoming plans for a new browsing mode in its Firefox web browser targeted at developers who are embarrassed to have web pages for extremely simple concepts on their screens. "Shame Mode" will allow the user to select several "skins" that can be applied to the page to conceal its contents at first glance, such as "Unit test readout", "Page source", or "Django exception stack trace". The browsing mode also natively supports StackOverflow, and will automatically change question titles like "Is Java pass by reference?" to something less embarrassing like "How does ConcurrentHashMap achieve its scalability?" in case a colleague happens to see your screen. Mozilla leadership indicated they expect to be able to offer this browsing mode as early as Firefox 56.

In the announcement, the venerable foundation detailed the process it used to identify the overwhelming desire of software engineers to not have to reveal they can't remember the exact syntax of a GROUP BY query since they haven't written one in six weeks. Firefox browser telemetry data collected anonymously showed that, when users visit documentation pages that are listed earlier in the site's index, user behavior suddenly becomes extremely erratic: frequency of changing tabs and window minimization increases 600%, and large-font page elements are scrolled just out of view or entirely removed manually from the page using the developer tools. Mozilla indicated in the press release that, based on this analysis and early user studies, it feels this feature will have an overwhelmingly positive reception from developers that are mortified to be seen searching for information they feel they're expected to already know.